Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (50 page)

The reason was Gouverneur K. Warren. This slightly built, droopy-mustached New Yorker looked more like an Italian chef than a soldier, and he invited people who judged only by appearances to discount him as yet another colorless military hack. Quite the opposite: he graduated second in his class
at West Point in 1850, began the war as the lieutenant colonel of the snappy 5th New York (“Duryea’s
Zouaves”), commanded a brigade under Meade in the 5th Corps, and was tapped by the watchful Joe Hooker to become his staff topographical engineer, and then chief engineer of the Army of the Potomac. This was in spite of Warren’s personal suspicions of Hooker and his
deep allegiance and admiration for Meade. When Hooker’s head fell, Meade’s first inclination had been to send
Daniel Butterfield packing after Hooker, and put Warren in Butterfield’s place as the Army of the Potomac’s chief of staff. But in the midst of a campaign, Warren advised Meade not to make more changes at the top than he absolutely needed to; Warren would stay on as chief engineer for now, and allow Meade to use him as the de facto chief of staff. It was Warren who counseled Meade not to try consequences with Ewell’s corps at
Wolf’s Hill that morning; it was also Warren who had alerted Meade to Dan Sickles’ advance to the
Emmitsburg Road. Now, after having accompanied Meade to the commanding general’s infuriating interview with Sickles, Warren looked around and suggested to Meade that it might be a good idea if he went up to the signal station on
Little Round Top and see if the rocky hill gave him any direct sight of the Confederates massing in the woods west of the Emmitsburg Road. “I felt so worried at the outlook,” Warren later wrote, “that I requested General Meade to let me go to Little Round Top … He directed me to do so, and I did not see him again till the attack had spent its force.”
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The Round Tops were really one, large natural tumulus with two pronounced peaks—the larger peak, Big Round Top, was the taller one, at 660 feet, but it was heavily wrapped in old-growth forest and offered little in the way of a vista despite its height. The lower peak was really a narrow spine, running north–south for about 250 yards, and heavily littered with granitelike boulders. Its east face was, like Big Round Top, thickly forested. But the west face had been conveniently cleared by logging operations, and from the spiny peak anyone with a horse nimble enough to clamber up the logging trails would emerge into a spectacular view across a rock-littered ravine, and see the granite undulations of ridgelines running in parallels to the mountains on the horizon. The nearest of these unsmiling ridges was
Houck’s Ridge, where Sickles had planted the far left of his 3rd Corps line—
John Henry Hobart Ward’s five regiments, with James Smith’s 4th New York Independent Battery set up amid the enormous rock outcroppings of
Devil’s Den. To their right was an open expanse of wheat field, and then another smattering of blue regiments spiked with flags and artillery batteries—de Trobriand’s brigade, strung out along the other stony ridge. In the far distance was the Sherfy peach orchard and the Emmitsburg Road, and Andrew Humphreys’ division, with its right flank hanging awkwardly unhinged from the larger formations of Union troops gathered on Cemetery Hill.
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What made Warren’s blood pool when he gained the peak of Little Round Top was the spectacle unfolding beyond the Emmitsburg Road: “From that point I could see the enemy’s lines of battle,” fixed bayonets glinting in the sun. Four big Confederate brigades were coming out of the woods like a pack
of ravenous wolves, then four more on their left flank, and then still more, on and on up the line, with enough weight of numbers to crash through Sickles’ corps as though it was a dead hedge. “The whole Confederate line was sweeping from out the woods in which it had formed,” wrote a junior officer in the
5th Corps, “far outflanking the left of the Third Corps line, where Smith’s battery, in air and almost unsupported on the rocks of the
Devil’s Den, gallantly waited their doom.” And not only theirs. The rebels farthest to Warren’s left were moving first; they would have to cover almost a mile of ground to reach Devil’s Den and Ward’s pitiful little brigade, but once they did, they would flatten everything in their path, spill over the stony ridge, and either swarm unopposed up the west face of the Round Tops, or plow right into the rear of the
3rd Corps.
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The signals detachment on Little Round Top had seen all of this for themselves, and had been trying in vain to awaken “General Sickles and … the general commanding” to their peril since first catching sight of Longstreet’s column that morning. Now they were packing up their equipment and getting ready to remove themselves from the threat no one else seemed interested in paying attention to. Warren’s first job was to tell them in reasonably blunt language to stay put and keep their flags wagging, if only to suggest to the oncoming Confederates that something was happening up there. His second was to get the help the signalers had been unsuccessful in attracting. Warren had two aides with him. He turned to one of them, Lt.
Ranald Mackenzie—“a fine, well-trained mind, a quick appreciation of every thing, and a brain always at work”—and sent him off down the rocky hillside to find Sickles and warn him to get some troops up on Little Round Top without delay, then find Meade and tell him “that we would at once have to occupy that place very strongly.” Meade was already trying to regain control of the situation by dispatching one of his own staffers to pull Andrew Humphreys’ division off the
Emmitsburg Road and send it down to Little Round Top. But not even Humphreys thought this was a good idea, and Meade quickly countermanded it. Sickles, who got Warren’s message through Mackenzie, flatly refused to send anyone to Little Round Top: he had not a regiment to spare, but if Mackenzie could find the 5th Corps, Sickles had been assured that
George Sykes’ troops could be used where they were needed. Off Mackenzie sped again, this time to find Sykes, who had ridden ahead of the 5th Corps to lay out lines of deployment. Sykes heard him out, then sent off an aide, twenty-one-year-old Capt.
William Jay, to intercept Barnes’ division and send a brigade up to Warren. Jay spied the head of the column, expecting to find Barnes there as well; what he found instead was
Strong Vincent.
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Vincent was a native of Erie, in the far northwest corner of Pennsylvania, a Harvard graduate (class of 1859), handsome, popular, sporting a
flamboyant set of side-whiskers. He volunteered with a local company at the outbreak of the war, and ended up as lieutenant colonel of the 83rd Pennsylvania. First impressions of Vincent were of a stuffed shirt.
Oliver Wilcox Norton, who would serve as Vincent’s orderly, “thought him a dude and an upstart.” But nobody in the 83rd had much to say about Vincent’s hauteur after Fredericksburg, where, “with sword in hand,” he “stood erect in full view of the enemy’s artillery, and though the shot fell fast on all sides, he never wavered nor once changed his position.” As
Amos Judson of the 83rd remarked afterward, “a high and chivalrous sense of duty” could make a lot of other defects pale in the estimate of the privates in the ranks. Vincent inherited command of the brigade the 83rd served in, though not a brigadier general’s star to go with it, and he was ambitiously frank in hoping that the orders to march to Sickles’ succor “will either bring me my stars, or finish my career as a soldier.”
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As Captain Jay approached, Vincent “left the head of his brigade and rode forward” and asked what he wanted. Jay replied that he had a message for General Barnes from General Sykes. That gave Vincent pause, since Vincent was aware that Barnes, like
Thomas Rowley the day before, had been medicating his pre-battle anxieties “out of a black commissary quart bottle” and was already “hollow from skull to boots.” What was the message, Vincent demanded. Captain Jay must have hesitated, because Vincent, already sure that Barnes was lost in his alcoholic fog, interjected, “What are your orders? Give me your orders.” The orders, said Jay, were for Barnes to “send one of his brigades to occupy that hill yonder,” pointing to Little Round Top. Very well, Vincent replied, he would take his own brigade, and also the responsibility for finding a way up to the crest of the hill. The column turned to the left, searching along the base of Little Round Top for a usable track, and finding none until they located a lane running up the south face of the hill. Vincent’s brigade sprinted up the hill, and it was from there, at around 4:30, that Strong Vincent could look down on a scene of pure disaster.
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The attack began to go awry with the first step Hood’s division took. Longstreet placed McLaws’ division “about parallel to the
Emmitsburg Road,” and because the Emmitsburg Road ran at a northeast–southwest angle, “Gen. Hood was deployed at an angle of about forty-five degrees to northward across it and leaning towards Round Top.” This was awkward, but Hood was going to make it worse, because he was unreconciled to Lee’s directive to cross the road and then curl left. He grumbled to
Philip Work, the colonel of
the 1st
Texas, that once “we get under fire, I will have a digression” (or maybe it was
discretion
) to make the move he wanted to make around
Little Round Top. In order to speed up their approach, his lead brigades—McIvor Law’s Alabamians and
Jerome Robertson’s Texans, numbering around 1,850 men—were to move forward in column and get over Devil’s Den and its stony ridge as fast as possible. But Gouverneur Warren had scribbled off a warning to James Smith’s
4th New York Independent Battery, perched on Devil’s Den with long-range 10-pounder
Parrott rifles that could punish Hood’s rebels as soon as they made an appearance. The boulder-thick ground limited Smith to using just four of his guns, with the remaining two and the battery’s caissons parked below and behind Devil’s Den. But four Parrotts were more than enough to do the sort of damage for which Warren was hoping. Smith had been trading fire with “a battery of six Light 12-pounders” in the distance for almost two hours, but with the appearance of the infantry, Smith was determined “to oppose and cripple this attack and check it as much as possible.”
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At four o’clock, Hood’s men came out into the open “in heavy columns of battalion,” and there they stopped, wrote a soldier in the 4th Texas, “during which the batteries commenced to play on us.” Smith’s Parrotts straddled the Texas brigade, the first salvo falling short, and the second screaming over their heads. But the third, of solid
shot, “hit our line about eight feet in front” then bouncing up and “knocking off one soldier’s head and cutting another in two, bespattering us with blood.” While the division’s pioneers were sent forward to tear down obstructions in front, Hood moved his brigades out of column, where their bunched masses were horribly vulnerable to the carom of solid shot, into line, which presented less of a packed target but which would be slowed to a crawl by the need to dress and redress the lines as they moved over the uneven ground in front of them. Even the temperatures were “extremely hot,” recalled another member of the 4th Texas, and “knapsacks, blankets, and other cumbersome non-essential battle equipment” was discarded.
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Law’s and Robertson’s brigades had hardly moved beyond the line of their own artillery supports when the next wheel came off. John Bell Hood was determined to go forward with this attack in person “on the left of a line” from the Texas brigade. The massed brigades had crossed the
Emmitsburg Road, rifles at right-shoulder-shift or at trail-arms, heading downslope toward the stone farmhouse of
Michael Bushman, when
John Cheves Haskell (one of Hood’s division artillery officers) brought up two batteries Hood wanted to position more closely in support of his attack. Haskell had just reported when Hood “turned, apparently to give me orders.” Instead, one of James Smith’s Parrott shells exploded over the group of mounted officers and aides around Hood and a shell splinter sliced through Hood’s left arm, from above the
elbow to the hand, breaking the bone. “I saw a spiracle [spherical] case
shot explode twenty feet over Hood’s head,” wrote Colonel Work of the 1st Texas, “saw him sway to and fro in the saddle.” Hood slid into the arms of his staffers, “utterly prostrated and almost fainting.” It was not actually as dramatic a wound as it looked, but Haskell could see that “it evidently gave him intense pain and utterly unnerved him, so that I could get no orders from him” about where to place the batteries. Neither would anyone else be getting orders from Hood that afternoon. A stretcher party lifted the wounded general and carried him to an
ambulance, where a dazed and shocked Hood sat “in front with the driver, his arm in a bloody bandage.” From that moment, his division would be “without a leader and ignorant of where the enemy is.”
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Parked on the crest formed by Devil’s Den and
Houck’s Ridge, the five Union regiments in John Ward’s brigade “saw the enemy’s Infantry coming out of the woods … marching as if on parade, across the open field.” Ward threw out a line of skirmishers to a stone wall 175 yards in front of Round Top composed of the 2nd U.S.
Sharpshooters, and as Hood’s division opened out from “columns of regiments” and bore down on the Sharpshooters, Smith’s four Parrott rifles let loose at them with “a heavy and destructive fire of canister, grape, and
shell.” The bewildering variety of ordnance was no exaggeration: Smith was firing anything he had on hand, as his crews struggled to bring up ammunition from the caissons parked behind Devil’s Den. “The guns were worked to their utmost,” remembered a nearby infantryman in the 124th New York. “I heard the gunners directed to use five and six second fuse, and when the gunners reported that the case shot and shrapnel were all gone, I heard the order, ‘Give them shell! Give them solid shot! Damn them, give them anything.’ ” And at long distance, the Parrotts could do their work extremely well. “The battery,” wrote one sergeant in the 124th New York, “working as I never saw gunners work before or since, tore gap after gap through the ranks of the advancing foe.”
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